Nafissa Thompson-Spires, the writer and author of a tremendous debut story collection, “Heads of the Colored People,” one of the best books of the year, lives in a subdivision at the edge of Champaign, clear across town from the University of Illinois, where she teaches creative writing. Long county roads cut through tall, perfect rows of August corn standing just beyond her street. And beyond that, flat expanse. Her street is silent and still, a suburbia that a movie crew might consider a little too appointed to play a credible suburb.

Ordinary beyond belief.

Children play games on wide, unnaturally green lawns as manmade streams meander between nearly identical middle-class, two-story homes. The only discordant notes on a late summer morning are a pair of Christmas wreaths, hooped around the light fixtures on her garage.

Which speaks to a busyness, to a household with much on its mind: Her husband, Derrick R. Spires, also teaches at U. of I., specializing in, for starters, early African-American print culture, early African-American literature and citizenship studies. Meanwhile, “Heads of the Colored People,” blurbed by a who’s who of mordant absurdism, including Mat Johnson and Aimee Bender, is being read by critics and authors as no less than a breakthrough in literary fiction about people of color. Here are a set of stories not quite situated in the past, not entirely steeped in politics and never overtly about struggle. Rather, the question of a character’s “authenticity” and blackness is tied to a loaf of brioche; a police shooting unfolds at a comic con; and a professor engages in an ongoing, passive-aggressive battle with a colleague about the lighting in their tiny office.

It’s all just a little too absurd not to be real.

“What got me was the verbal panache, the way she can go anywhere,” said George Saunders, the Man Booker Prize winner and Chicago native celebrated for his own stories awash in compassion and ambivalence and full of satire for the way we live now. “High, low, pop culture, intellectual culture. She is always writing about the individual, conflicted. And (she) does it in the classic way — paying attention to the details.”

Thompson-Spires’ story “Belles Lettres,” for example, which reads like a classic, is told as an exchange of emails, hilariously ugly letters between parents of black girls, the only black kids in their class, who are bullying each other.

One parent writes:

Maybe it would be wise to go through Fatima’s backpack every night instead of once in a blue moon. I have heard from more than one parent that it smells like eggs.

That is an ear tuned for micro-aggressions, and to placid surfaces straining to remain poised. It’s not hard to imagine those emails zinging back and forth between the homes in Thompson-Spires’ seemingly frictionless neighborhood. Asked what she thinks of the Midwest, the author, a native of California, smiles and says: “Oh, it’s super friendly.”

Then, as if replying to her own response, she adds: “Which at times can make it feel like performance.”

Daryl Wilson / for the Chicago Tribune

Nafissa Thompson-Spires has struggled with chronic pain from endometriosis.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires has struggled with chronic pain from endometriosis. (Daryl Wilson / for the Chicago Tribune)

Thompson-Spires moved to Champaign six years ago, after the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offered her a spot in its MFA creative writing program and her husband a position in the English department. She had received her Ph.D. in English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and taught at Vanderbilt and Tennessee State University, but she was not prepared for a Midwest winter. About four years ago, not long after arriving in Illinois, decades of chronic pain — which Thompson-Spires, now 34, said began in her teens — came to a head one night when her husband was away on work. She called a 24-hour medical hotline and described the symptoms. “They told me to get to an emergency room,” she recalled. “And I said, ‘Really?‘ And they said ‘Yeah.’ Meanwhile, there’s a snowstorm, and I had never driven in snow. Neither had my Mustang.”

What followed, she wrote last spring in the Paris Review (lapsing cheekily into the lyrics from “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), was years of tests: “A colonoscopy, two upper endoscopies, a gastric emptying scan, an MRI, a vulvar biopsy, a dozen transvaginal ultrasounds, two mammograms before I was thirty-four, a laparoscopy, a laparotomy, a mosquito, a libido ...” After many, many misdiagnoses, she eventually learned that she had endometriosis, a condition in which tissue that grows inside of a uterus grows on the outside of a uterus, occasionally on the vital organs, causing intense pain and bleeding.

Between hospital visits and teaching, she started many of the stories in “Heads of the Colored People”; in Paris Review, she wrote, “It means something to me to be able to produce when something is daily trying to take me out.”

The result, she says now, was unexpected: “Frankly, I never thought I would want to write stories dealing with periods or reproductive health. I never thought I would want to read stories about that, never mind write them. But I was writing through a lot of pain, and I had stories now that weren’t the lighthearted funny stuff I had expected to come out. Even the story that ends with police brutality — it revealed itself and I had to have the confidence to respond.”

That story, the title story, sets the tone for the book and establishes many of its recurring themes. It begins with a black cosplayer — “Riley wore blue contact lenses and bleaches his hair, which he worked with gel and a blow-dryer and a flatiron some mornings into Sonic the Hedgehog spikes ...” — then veers into the ways that identity gets policed, at the exhaustion felt by those who find themselves representing all black people, at the insidious ways even the least remarkable acts become political acts.

Each story reads as if it’s in conversation with the others, sometimes literally, returning to characters and occasionally arguing with the whys and hows its own stories are told. One story ends in police violence against a black man, but Thompson-Spires breaks from convention and never foreshadows that violence; the story’s unnamed narrator then breaks tone, growing increasingly frustrated with literary tropes, declaring an unwillingness to indulge in the gore and the misery that audiences come to expect.

Thompson-Spires calls the story a “middle finger to the expectations of MFA programs” and playing it safe.

Dawn Davis, founder of 37 Ink, the imprint of Atria and Schuster that published “Heads of Colored People,” said: “When we sent out (the manuscript) to a bunch of writers hoping for blurbs … we got back two dozen, and the word we kept seeing, in almost every one of the responses, was ‘original.’ Nafissa had not held back and it helped.” She sees Thompson-Spires developing into a major literary figure in the mold of a Junot Diaz or Paul Beatty, “writing about community and race but also how to be different within community and race. She is saying community is not a monolith. She gets dark: A singer almost drowns her child, and a man at an anime comic book convention is mistaken for threatening — that’s an original take on threats to the black body. She’s attacking the flanks as she goes about it, which tends to take her readers completely off guard.”

Last fall, after reading the manuscript, Kiese Laymon, whose own celebrated books touch on the physical and psychological violence done to black bodies, and often feel in conversation with the history of black literature, tweeted that Thompson-Spires “wrote what we been waiting for in Heads of the Colored People. Goodness gracious.”

The other day, Thompson-Spires sat at the dining room table in her sterile, eerily minimalist home — it looks more like a model of a home than a place where people live — looking serene, calm, so composed it was hard not to recall that she’s written that she’s often in pain. Asked if she was in pain, she said she was, that morning, but not now.

The pain, however, never entirely passes; endometriosis has no cure. She suspects she developed it around 15 and showed symptoms for 20 years, “but I was treated as a hypochondriac — I mean I was told I was, routinely.” Born in San Diego, she grew up in California’s Inland Empire, just east of Los Angeles. Her father works for an education tech company and her mother as a diversity-education specialist (at the same company). It was a home defined by books, by stacks beside the couches, bookshelves lining hallways.

She said, “I read a lot of what you would expect — Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary. But I also wished I had better options that reflected the life I was living. All of those characters are white and nobody was dealing with being one of the only black kids in school, what I was dealing with. My mom was always trying to get me to read black fiction but they were so heavy-handed with history and people imperiled and crosses being burned on front lawns. It was either history or suffering, and nothing for a black girl not dealing with the KKK but just living in the early ’90s and dealing with your casual racism. I would have loved a black Ramona the Pest, a black character who didn’t take crap. Harriet the Spy had a spy notebook, and I had a spy notebook — you’re supposed to learn there not to spy, but I had learned that it was pretty awesome to be nosy.

“I was like those characters, only black. I skipped a grade so I was the youngest in class, I was loud and bossy, and very performative, so I would get picked on a lot.” She said the story about the two mothers’ escalating war of passive aggressiveness was inspired by a letter her own mother passed along, written when Thompson-Spires was a child, by a mother complaining about her. “She said I was anti-social, I had bad social skills and I called her grandmother the ‘B’ word, but her own daughter was a sweet girl.” She said the other girl “had been the only black girl for a while until I came along, and for whatever reason, I think she felt that she had to push me out of that space she occupied.”

Daryl Wilson / for the Chicago Tribune

Thompson-Spires describes one of her short stories as a “middle finger to the expectations of MFA programs” and playing it safe.

Thompson-Spires describes one of her short stories as a “middle finger to the expectations of MFA programs” and playing it safe. (Daryl Wilson / for the Chicago Tribune)

The fallout of underrepresentation swims beneath “Heads of the Colored People.” Indeed, the title comes from a series of 19th-century profiles of everyday black middle-class life. Thompson-Spires’ husband, an expert in 18th- and 19th-century black literature, had recommended she read James McCune Smith, a pioneering African-American doctor and correspondent for Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Smith was drawn to the mundane realities of ordinary people, writing about gravediggers and news vendors and shoe shiners; in fact, his subjects proved so commonplace that Douglass, in an early example of respectability politics, wrote a public rebuke, asking Smith to please, please “bring some of the real heads of the colored people before our readers.”

Spires said his wife’s characters are similar, “everyday people we see on the street,” but “what’s fresh is she’s embedded their lives with the humor and pain, the details of mundane struggles, that real folks experience.” Thompson-Spires found an organizing principle in Smith’s work. But instead of fugitive slaves and laundry ladies, she wanted to write about black nerds, professors at small colleges, social-media obsessives and protective suburban mothers.

She decided to “play with Smith’s title broadly,” she said, “considering psychology, phrenology, actual head injuries.”

And several characters experience chronic pain.

Partly, she wanted to give herself some context, to explain the years of reshuffling schedules and grumpy behavior. “I never sleep, I am in pain every day,” she said. “I had a surgery in May I thought would be the big surgery to fix everything, and it hasn’t been.” But she was unsure of mentioning endometriosis by name, fearing she would be a magnet for sufferers before she was ready to address them.

In the end, she gave characters her same disorder, as a way of saying this thing happens to everyday people, too.

Her next book will be about about a girl with endometriosis.

“People say you’re depressed, you’re a hypochondriac. I find doctors dismissive of women, and when you’re black, that adds an extra layer of not having credibility with doctors,” she said. “You wonder if it’s because you’re black, or because you’re a woman, or because you’re a black woman. People think about black women as being more tolerant to pain — that you’re supposed to be the strong one.

“But I am in pain most of the time. So it’s a big part of life. You want to be productive, to live an ordinary life, to write well, to have any quality of life — to be nice? You maintain faith that things get better. And the struggle never ends.”